Robert Pitt is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Arts in Society.

More information about Robert Pitt

I am an external PhD student writing a thesis on the unpublished epigraphic manuscript of the 18th-century English traveller Anthony Askew, whose recording of Greek and Latin inscriptions in Athens provides a wealth of new texts and helps us examine the development of epigraphy as a discipline before the creation of the first scientific corpora in the 19th century.

Research

My research focuses on the published accounts and manuscript diaries, notebooks and correspondence of early English and French travellers to Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, with a particular focus on those visitors who copied inscriptions, the reasons how and why they did so, how their academic and social networks influenced their understanding of ancient inscribed monuments, and what forms their discussions, lectures and published works took.

Curriculum Vitae

Having been Assistant Director of the British School at Athens from 2007-2014, I have subsequently taught ancient history and archaeology at College Year in Athens. I have published Greek and Latin inscriptions from the manuscripts of early travellers, and from projects at Athens, Sparta, and Kenchreai. I am a member of the Kerameikos excavation team of the DAI, responsible for the Late Classical to Roman period inscribed trapezai and kioniskoi monuments.

Selected publications

- Attic Inscriptions in UK Collections vol. 4.6: British Museum Funerary Monuments, 2022, pp. 1-201.

- ‘Just as It Has Been Written: Inscribing Building Contracts at Lebadeia,’ in N. Papazarkadas (ed.) The Epigraphy and History of Boeotia: New Finds, New Prospects, Brill 2014, 373-394.

- ‘Inscribing Construction: The Financing and Administration of Public Building in Greek Sanctuaries,’ in M. M. Miles (ed.) A Companion to Greek Architecture, Wiley-Blackwell 2016, 194-205.

- ‘Hunting Inscriptions on the Ionian Mission: Richard Chandler and the Development of Greek Epigraphy’, in I. Jenkins & L. Stewart eds., The Romance of Ruins, The Search for Ancient Ionia, 1764, Sir John Soane’s Museum 2021, 83-89.

- ‘Early Travelers and the Rediscovery of Athens’, in J. Neils & D. K. Rogers eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Athens, Cambridge 2021, 437-48.

- ‘Little epigraphy. Texts on public and private objects’, Lampas 54.1 (2021) 119-36.

- ‘Naming strategies in the Sicilian Expedition: Characters under the Spotlight and Actors in the Wings’, in N. Marinatos & R. K. Pitt (eds.), Thucydides the Athenian, (College Year in Athens Papers 1), Athens 2022, pp. 175-99.

- 'Sixty-five New Attic Funerary Inscriptions from the Manuscripts of Michel Fourmont (1690–1746) and Anthony Askew (1722–1774)', ZPE 228, 2023, 137–62.

- 'New and Neglected Athenian Catalogues and Dedications from the Epigraphic Manuscripts of Michel Fourmont (1690–1746) and Anthony Askew (1722–1774)', ZPE 229, 2024, 113–26.

- 'Fourmontiana: Twenty Attic Inscriptions Copied by Michel Fourmont (1690–1746)', ZPE 131, 2024, 209-225.